That may be an overestimate, or it may be, and probably is, an underestimate. If we assume it to be fairly correct, it means that in one city something like 3700 mothers needlessly endured the supreme agony, and as many lives were sacrificed to poverty. It means that to the 80,000 babies annually devoured by the wolf of poverty must be added another 45,000 killed by the same cruel foe in the passage of the race from the womb of dependence to a separate existence. Whatever the number may be, it is certain that many are still-born because of the fatigue and overexertion of the mothers in the critical periods of pregnancy and that many more are suffocated in the passage from the womb because of the employment of untrained and unskilled midwives—especially, as often is the case, when the “midwife” is only a kindly neighbor called in because of the poverty of the family to which the child comes. And it may be added, incidentally, that still-birth is not by any means the only danger from this source, nor the most lamentable. Many accidents of a non-fatal character occur at birth which seriously affect the whole of life. Carelessness, inexperience, and ignorance may cause the suffocation of the child, or by pressure upon some delicate nerve centre irreparable injury may be caused to it, such as paralysis for life or hopeless imbecility.[38] XI It is a strange fact of social psychology that people in the mass, whether nations or smaller communities, or crowds, have much less feeling and conscience than the same people have as individuals. People whose souls would cry out against such conditions as we have described coming under their notice in a specific case, _en masse_ are unmoved. As individuals we fully recognize that charity can never take the place of justice, but collectively, as citizens, we are prone to solace ourselves with the thought that charity, organized and unorganized, somehow meets the problem, and we blind ourselves to the contrary evidences which everywhere confront us. But it is only too true that charity—“that damnably cold thing called charity”—fails utterly to meet the problem of poverty in general and childhood’s poverty in particular. Nothing could be more pathetic than the method employed by so many charitable persons and societies of attempting to solve the latter problem by finding employment for the mother, as if that were not the worst phase of all from any sane view of the child’s interest. Charity degrades and demoralizes, and there is little or no compensating effective help. In the vast majority of cases it fails to reach the suffering in time to save them from becoming chronic dependents. More and more the heart and brain of the world are coming to a recognition of the fact that charity, however well organized, cannot solve the problems which the gigantic and blind forces inhering in the laws of social development have called into being.